


Just a temporary kidnapping

by Woozletania



Series: Sanctuary [7]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hangover, Imprisonment, Kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 10:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11965188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woozletania/pseuds/Woozletania
Summary: Rocket is kidnapped by a very polite Ravager captain who wants him to work on his ship.  Ah, the travails of being the best tinkerer anyone around here's ever seen. Short one-shot.





	Just a temporary kidnapping

Rocket swam up toward consciousness. He very, very badly wanted not to, because between him and the light was a thick, greasy layer of pain. Despite his best efforts he rose, into the pain, into light like daggers in his eyes.

“Aw man, my head.” Gently he felt with his sensitive little hands, sure he’d find blood and brains leaking out. Instead there was just the fur, his ears pressed back against the sides of his head where they only lay when he was very angry or very unhappy. He was sure that only the reinforcing plates in his skull kept it from splitting open. Cybernetic servos in his arms whined as he shifted on a soft surface, trying to find a comfortable spot. The pain and nausea made it impossible.

“You about awake over there?”

A voice, terribly loud. He winced and covered his ears. “Go ‘way.”

“'Kay, I’ll come back in an hour. Cup by your bed has some stuff the doc says ’ll make ya feel better, you drink that when you can, 'kay?” 

“Wait.” He didn’t know that voice, and that was a bad sign. Without lifting himself from the bed he felt around until he found the cup. Incredibly sensitive clawed hands pulled it closer, feeling the pitted ceramic, and a nose fifty times as keen as a man’s sniffed.

It didn’t smell bad. Not bitter. Spices, some alcohol, drugs. He recognized the brew, or close enough: he’d been drunk enough times to know how to mix something like it himself. Eyes still tightly closed against the piercing light he lapped up the spicy cocktail, for once not caring that someone saw him drinking like an animal.  


There was an immediate sense of relief as the warmth of his mouth volatilized compounds to be absorbed through his sinuses. The pain was still there, but fading. He chanced opening an eye. What he saw when he got used to what turned out to be dim lighting wasn’t promising.

He was stark naked, for one thing. Well, except for the fur. The walls around the bed were great slabs of riveted alloy. Overhead was an equally thick slab of armorglass with lighting elements above that. Thankfully only one of nine elements was lit.

As he recovered from the hangover his ears began to work properly and he registered the hum of distant engines. He was on a ship, then, and not one he’d even been on before.

“There ya go. Good for what ails ya, right?”

He didn’t feel like puking anymore either. He still wasn’t happy when he rolled over. The room turned out to be about three by four meters, with a series of tridee screens on one wall behind a sheet of armorglass almost as thick as the one on the ceiling. There was a little relief station, the old flushing mechanical type without so much as a single indicator light, and an armored door three times as tall as he was. Sitting in a bolted-down alloy frame chair was a yellow-skinned biped. 

Yellow skin, scars, that red outfit, the Ravager symbol like a leaf with seven upward-pointing thorns. He’d seen enough Ravagers now, from Yondu and his crew to Kraglin to Stakarr and the other high mucky-mucks he’d called to tell about Yondu’s death to recognize a captain’s insignia.

“Aw man. Here we go again, huh?” Rocket’s fangs came out and his ears went back. “Lemme guess. I can hear your ship’s out of whack from here, there’s a crack in one of your drive crystals and you got problems with life support too, from the smell. An’ I’m supposed to fix it all like a good little slave, right?”

“You ain’t a slave,” the man said calmly. “I’m Cap'n Triger, an’ this rust bucket is the _Violent Lady._ Lemme tell ya how it’s gonna be.”

“I ain’t gonna join your crew,” Rocket snarled. “Fix your own damn ship.”

Triger stood. “Outside this door is a locked corridor with four a’ my toughest in it. Unarmed. Not even a knife. Nothin’ you can take and kill us with, just five big Ravagers and a hall you won’t get out of even if you beat us. Now I’m gonna go out this door. You got two choices, okay? You can stay in here,” he gestured at the armored walls, “Watch some videos. We slide food in though this slot. In a week we let ya go back to yer friends. I even got ya a comfy bed after I heard the kind ya like.”

Rocket realized he was sitting in a round, padded bed, bigger than the pet bed Quill got him but almost as comfortable. It was obviously meant for an animal, but as long as the Ravager didn’t say anything about that he could handle it. And the Ravager didn’t.

“So you can stay here for a week. Pretty borin’ though. Or.”

“Or?”

“Or you can take over a work crew I assign ya. Make 'em do whatever ya want. I bet you like that idea. Tinker with stuff. Doesn’t have ta be the drive, but I wouldn’t complain. An’ in a week we still let ya go, only richer.”

Rocket’s eyes narrowed. “How much richer?”

“Five thousand Units. Ten if you get the drives workin’ right. I hear you’re good with drives.”

“You drugged me and kidnapped me just to work on your ship?”

“Din’ take much, drunk as you were. But lemme make this clear.” Triger raised one finger, thick with rings. Not gaudy, jeweled ones, but hard, metallic, spiky ones. Fighting rings, bolted to his fingers. “I ain’t gonna try to make you do this. You wanna just sit in this room, ya can. You get let go either way. After what happened to cap'n Sharktooth and the _Superb Nova_ I ain’t gonna try to make you do anythin’. But I’ll pay ya to.”

“What’s a Superb Nova?”

Triger grinned. His filed, sharp-pointed teeth reminded Rocket eerily of Yondu. “You can say you don’t know why Sharktooth’s ship blew up after you escaped. But don’t try to tell me you don’t know the ship. Talked to Shark and he had this great idea, kidnap you and make you use your smart little hands on his ship. Didn’t work out so well for him, did it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure ya don’t. So, what’s it gonna be? Watch some screens for a week or get paid?”

Rocket looked around the room. Now that he had recovered he noted the complete absence of tech. Not one button, no junction boxes. Just hard alloy and armorglass. He was good at getting out of cells, very good indeed, but this one? It was a metal box. Someone had finally worked out that the way to keep his hands out of the tech was simply not to have any in his cell. There were signs that the armorglass was hastily, but competently installed, and recently, to keep him out of the tridee screens and even the overhead lights. They’d modified the cell just for him. It was almost flattering. 

Now, he did still have a trick or two if they hadn’t scanned him _too_ thoroughly, but…

“How do I know you’ll let me go?”

“B'cause a two things. First, yer friends are already looking for ya. We’re way out on the Rim and it’ll take 'em a while, but I don’t want to make an enemy of that green skinned lady. Y'know the one. Daughter a Thanos. I don’t need her or the Destroyer or an angry tree comin’ after me for revenge.”

“And the other thing?”

“You got friends in high places,” Triger pulled out a bundle of clothing that’d been pressed between his back and the metal chair and tossed it to Rocket. The color and material told him what it was before it started to unroll: a Rocket-sized Ravager uniform. “You called us to the funeral. We haven’t forgotten. You prolly think we’re all assholes, but we don’t forget things like that. Weren’t for you we wouldn’t have known 'bout Yondu.”

“Yeah.” Rocket looked away. Darn his soft heart. He teared up too easily, always had.

“So you’re an honorary Ravager. 'Less you do something stupid, you’re as safe here as you are on that old Ravager fighter Star-Prince flies.”

“Star Munch,” Rocket said automatically.

“Oh yeah, I knew it were something like that. So, what’re ya gonna do with your week?”

“All right,” Triger roared a few minutes later to the assembled crew. They were as motley an assortment of aliens as Yondu’s old crew, but almost all recognizably humanoid. Rocket knew there were species so strange that he and Triger were peas in a pod by comparison, but it was normally like this: Him and a room full of big bald bodies, all staring at him and talking.

“Simmer down!” the captain roared, and gradually the uproar in the room quieted. “You listen close, y'hear. This here’s Rocket. For the next seven days you, Braal,” he pointed at a grease-stained Shi'ar, “Yer working for him, and yer whole engineerin’ crew too. He says jump, you ask how high. Anybody else he needs, you’re workin’ for him too. An’ I better not hear that you didn’t.”

The chief engineer was brave enough to speak up. Rocket had to respect him for that. “Cap'n, we got it under control.”

“No ya don’t Braal. You know well as I do you got this ship patched together. We got Kree drives, half the hull is Skrull and we’re not sure part of it isn’t _actually_ skrulls, and those two bits are still fightin’ the last Kree-Skrull War. Then we got that computer core from that wrecked Badoon cruiser and that’s not countin’ the Shi'ar and Rigellian bits. Whole ship’s fightin’ itself and you know it. An’ I hear tell this little guy is the best tinkerer anyone’s ever seen.”

“One week!” roared the captain. He carried on haranguing the crew but Rocket wasn’t listening. All these disparate parts working together? How were the interfaces working at _all?_ His little clawed hands itched to get into the circuits and see how they had it wired together. Triger should have led with that. He would have done it for free.

Well, not free. But cheaper. And then there was the other thing.

The chief engineer approached and Rocket shook his hand. “I can’t wait to see how you got all this tech working together. You must have a hell of a team.”

The Shi'ar blinked, as astonished as Quill or the rest of the Guardians would be by Rocket’s respectful tone. “I look forward to any help you can give us,” the engineer said. His expression said _maybe this won’t be so bad after all._

But at the same time Rocket was looking the rest of the crew over. So many pirates, Ravagers, assholes. Some he could work with, he was sure. But a whole lot of them were looking down their noses or assorted facial appendages at the little freak. And all of them ordered to do what he wanted?

He foresaw a pressing need for crewmen to muck out the ship’s sanitation system, to squeeze through vents. To form human pyramids so he could get at high bits of work. And an awful lot of them had tasty cybernetics bits or metal implants he just knew would be needed for repairs. A lot of them were going to be hopping, squinting, or gumming their food very soon.

Rocket allowed himself a polite smile, but repressed the urge to rub his hands together and grin. This was going to be _fun._


End file.
